While delaying its detailed response, it was perhaps significant that yesterday the NATO spokesman insisted that the attacks on the sanatorium in Surdelica and the bridge in Navarin were legitimate military targets. There was no response to the questioning of why the bridge was attacked during the middle of the day, when it might be expected to have civilians on it. Shea's reply was merely to give a list of gross numbers of Kosovo Albanian civilians displaced, tortured or murdered.
Some of this might just be widening the margins of tolerance of the amount of civilian casualties there are prepared to say are accidental collateral damage.
But there are real possibilities that the NATO command has shifted its concept of what is a legitimate target. This would be consistent with their impression that morale has broken in the Serb population in the last couple of weeks. It may be calculating that the deaths of 50 Serb civilians in two days, far from strengthening Serb resolve may weaken it ahead of a crucial sert of meetings determining the interpretation of the G8 conditions which Serbia has said it will accept.
I was against the widening of the war to economic targets and I am against this further widening. But I would say to the many sincere, intelligent, informed , and committed left-wing subscbribers that it is not enough merely to oppose everything that western governments do as a matter of course. It is necessary to oppose them on the basis of a wider strategy challenging their claim to be the hegemonic arbiters of international justice and instead pinpoint the issues that would shape a juster concept of international world governance, which is being fashioned now, through such struggles.
In this case that includes recognition of the right of the people of Kosovo to self-determination. That is why Carter's criticism of NATO is reformist but more useful than the blanket 'revolutionary' critical stance of more left wing members of marxism-space.
Chris Burford
London